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May 1997. I must have read about the Anon Salon party in the San Francisco Cacophony Society newsletter. Reminisce about last year's Burning Man, show your photos, and volunteer to start building this year's city in the desert on Memorial Day. I thought, here's my chance to find an escape from the melodrama that has been my life for the last few months. Last year's Desert Burn was a gas, working my butt off on our Free Shower camp. Maybe I'll find some like minds, dust devils that would sweep me into a magic desert of mystery and discovery. Maybe I can help build this artists' colony in the Nevada desert and use it as a retreat myself. Hmm...
Fortune favors the brave! Walking down an anonymous Salon hallway, I overheard two intensely demeanored people hashing about finding someone to head up the reroofing of a building on the ranch. Boldly I said, "I can do that!" and offered my services to Harley and Will, who help organize the event. I remember them looking a little incredulous... but I promised I would come up and help show some artists how to swing a hatchet, since I had a lot of roofing and construction experience. So, the next day I drove the six hours up from San Francisco to Fly Ranch, north of Gerlach and a little west of the Black Rock Desert playa. Little did I know I'd be spending weeks up there as the summer went on.
Memorial Day, 1997 found a few dozen of us jackrabbits at Fly Ranch shoveling cow shit, bull snakes, wood rats, and assorted vermin out of a couple of neglected ranch buildings. The ranch houses a mile north of the main camp area were to be the central organizational spot for medical and firefighting staff for this year's burn. We roofed, wired, insulated, prepped for sheet rock, cleared brush, and burned a lot of nasty stuff that created a horrible stench. We all discovered new friends in the daytime work, around bonfires at night, and at Fly Geyser, a fantastic hot spring only a mile away, with a steaming, sputtering geyser and huge swimming ponds.
Fly Ranch is owned by cattle rancher John Casey, whose niece, Ann Westerbeke, is caretaker with her husband Van. Annie offered the Ranch for this year's Desert Burn, possibly leading to a long-term home for the Project. The ranch skirts a cove along the roughly circular Hualapai Flat, a relatively small playa, or mudflat, a little west of the 1996 Desert Burn. It will only be about a mile from the paved Hwy 447 to the center of camp on a road graded through the sagebrush. To get to the proposed center of the BM universe we dodged through a half mile of sagebrush, chamise, rabbits, and cow pies, which then gave way to grass, rushes, salt grass, pickleweed, shore birds, and more cow pies. The playa is dry only along the very edge this time of year -- the center is covered with water now. The playa edge is very much like the San Francisco Bay shore, without the lapping waves. Intermittent streams coming off the Granite Range wet portions of the playa edge. The Granites rise abruptly to 8000 feet along the west side of the highway, much as the Sierras from Hwy 395. The playas are about 3900 feet in elevation.
June, July 1997. Benefit events for the Project at the Somar (down on Brannan near the Jewelry Mart) and Anon-Salon (at Ninth & Folsom, south of Market in San Francisco) performance spaces have generated a fantastic amount of activity. It's exciting to be part of getting the project moving. I helped stage the Somar show, "Mysteria," and was recruited to build the Cafe Temps Perdu, a shaded gathering spot in the center of the city.
August 1997 - Building Black Rock City. Taming this site and breaking new ground must be a little like settling the plains. What dedicated, plumb crazy people - Flash up on the bulldozer day and night, Tony setting fenceposts, Flynn building and rebuilding everything in sight, and Van riding fence up and down the Playa edge on grader, dozer, and aeroplane. And me, crawling out of the tent at before sunrise to make coffee, and returning at sunset. The stubborn sagebrush and greasewood up in the parking area are tough to pull down, and the ground isn't as level as it looks - humungous rabbit holes. The playa is wet clay, below a thin dry crust, as I found out after getting the truck mired in a wet spot. Black Rock City was laid out by Joegh and Rod, designer of the City, who set flagging in the playa mud around the perimeter of BLM land and along proposed avenues. Flynn worked on everything under the sun, from hours before sun-up until dark-thirty. Tony rode herd on volunteer crews. (Too many others too mention - because I don't have enough photos to post! Thanks all!) Through it all, night visits to Fly hot springs help us soak off the dust and the soreness - a little piece of Heaven.
Cafe Temps Perdu, the Cafe of Time Lost, was this year's project by P. Segal, who yearly organizes a happy gathering spot in the center of the City. Somewhat left on my own, I built most of the Cafe, driving back to Reno to get some of the materials. The cafe storage shed took two days to bang together -- first structure on the playa! All reusable panels! Thanks to all who helped build the Cafe -- Circus Ridiculous, the geothermal hunky guys, Flynn, Tony, Ruth, Jed, et al. Many thanks to P. & Dawn for the inspiration, encouragement, and caffeine. Next year we'll have a rotating demitasse cup.
Yeeeehahhh! In the middle of all our feverish work in the hot sun and blinding wind of August, John Casey came crashing through the sagebrush in his Cadillac, rounding up his cattle to truck to market. Some local cowboys rounded up four- or five-hundred heifers. We volunteered to do a quick rebuilding of the corral for Van and Annie, unluckily in the middle of a windstorm. The next day we watched the horses and dogs go to work, and it felt like a hundred years ago.
Temporal Decomposition, an installation by artist Jim Mason, was a *big* ball of ice in the avenue between the Man and the center of camp. Jim started his project early to freeze all sixteen tons of ice using a refrigeration unit from a tractor-trailer and a mountain of foam and straw insulation. The sphere, stripped of its insulating shell and laid bare in the sun, was not unironically reflective of the fugitive nature of all the flaming and burnable art on the Playa.
September 1997. After being up to my skivvies in work on the cafe, building our theme camp, tearing back to the Bay Area to take care of business, and dealing with the usual opening night chaos, I finally got to enjoy the show. On my return to Black Rock, it looked awfully lonesome -- oops, wrong playa!
Pedal Camp was the first camp to raise its flag on the Playa - a project of Chicken John and his band-o'-loons, Circus Ridikulous. They built outrageously reworked and rewelded bikes and trikes from scavenged bikes and shopping carts. No brakes? - NEVERMIND! I helped them plunder a few local spots for wood, tin, old bicycles and such to build their camp, and the boys helped me quite a bit with the cafe. Many thanks! Go see them perform when they plunder your town!
The Daughters of Ishtar was this year's dramatic extravaganza organized by Pepe Ozan. His theatrical aggregation descended on the Playa about a week before the opening, and they got a quick start on their monumental, mythic constructions of mud and steel for the coming Saturday night performance. The ruins left after the burn were monumental in themselves. A spooky gateway to Center Camp, the Tower of Bones, was built by sculptor Michael Christian next to the Black Rock Ranger station. Ranch neighbors located piles of horse and cow bones, with some almost-complete skeletons, for Michael to lash onto a matrix of steel rods. (Michael, and Todd, helped me some on the cafe; thanks to Todd for the gramophone music on a peaceful night on the playa.) The House of Doors was the place to hang for open-mike performances. (My thanks to Chris for the beautifully painted Cafe Temps Perdu sign.) We genuflected at the Church of the Slide Guitar, on the northern frontier, on Sunday morning. Truly spiritual. Later we found a crew loading the Man with pyrotechnics.
Campo Illuminado, out on the spooky northern borders of our ephemeral city, greeted us with an illuminated garden of Space Spores at the entry to the Very Large Array. This Array was a "sound garden" of two hundred speakers, dusting the night with spacy Sirenian sounds, but only for the lucky few who heard its call between dusk and dawn, or who were dragged out in the middle of the night in artist Lexie's big truck. (Many thanks to Coffee Boy, Lexie, Aaron, Jeremy, Darryl, Sabine, Cliff, Bruce, Alex, et al.)
Our own theme camp, Windy City, was a regeneration of the Tomales Bay Explorers Club, of fantastic projects and explorations past. We erected a windmill made of scavenged parts from around the valley, including the blade from the windmill which formerly pumped water at the ranch. A tribute to my father, who was a farmer's son. *Wind art* was our general theme. Thanks to all our campers and visitors -- Karl, Liz, Steve, Dave, Russ, Brad, Paul, Mike & Mike, Jason, et al -- from BillyBob. Next year we'll knock'em dead.
We also assembled two homemade three-wheeled "land sailers" from spare auto and motorcycle parts to take passengers for rides on the lake bed, but were a bit unsuccessful with our prototypes. Our sails were from a small sailboat and a sailboard, axles from two Chevy Sprints at the Pick-Your-Part, and junk from the basement.
Scenes from Windy City Camp
In the aftermath of the Burn, we found the Vegematic had met its match -- the immersible object vs the irresistible farce. Steel vs frozen water. All was quiet, when the Ravers fled, leaving ghosts, hard-core campers, garbage, doggawn dieties, pink clouds, and human flotsam. We punctuated our hell-ride back home with a stop at Fort Brokenshort.
© Bob Stahl | Home
Thanks to Bruce Lee for two of the pics.